Thursday, March 19, 2009

AFES SALT: Resurrecting the Gospel

My article on the centrality of the resurrection in the apostolic gospel has been published in the Autumn AFES SALT magazine. I'm on page 10. Byron also has an article on Heaven: Not the End of the World.

If you don't already receive SALT, you can freely subscribe here.

And at some point I'll probably post my article on hebel.

6 comments:

Mike Bull said...

Matt

I look forward to seeing it posted here.

I read the AFES promo:

"Simply put, without the resurrection, there is no Christianity."

Their intent is good, but I maintain peskily that a Christianity that vacillates on the meaning of "death" in Genesis 3 is swinging the gnostic's rubber sword when it comes to the resurrection.

People today "don't need" resurrection, because they have been taught, often by Christians, that death (in natural selection) was a crucial part of how we got here.

And this makes me very, very mad with a lot of Christians. It makes the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus into peddling so much snake oil.

Thank God that His Spirit even works through the hamstrung preaching of many Christian academics who have compromised with pop-science, pop-anthropology and pop-history. The secularism they are combating stands on exactly the same foundation, which renders them largely irrelevant.

(No reflection on AFES here at all - they probably don't have an official position on "death".)

Matthew Moffitt said...

Mike,

I can't speak for AFES, but my sense of their 'policy' (if indeed they had/needed one) was that death sucks. It's unnatural and with sin has held God's good creation in fear and bondage. And death itself has been put-to-death, so to speak, by the resurrection of Jesus and the arrival of new creation.

Mike Bull said...

That doesn't really answer my gripe, but thanks.

Matthew Moffitt said...

PS I saw some nasty letters responding to you in the Gazette on the weekend.

Hang in there!

Matthew Moffitt said...

People today "don't need" resurrection because they've been taught that resurrection = going to heaven when you die and sitting around on nice fluffy clouds playing harps and singing songs. And everyone gets in.

Mike Bull said...

Re: resurrection

Gnosticism about heaven has its roots in gnosticism about Genesis.

Re: Gazette. Thanks for your encouragement. The letter about DNA I have sent a reply. The other one, he is just mad because I pointed out that he got his quotes confused. And he repeated the URL for me! Bonus.